Posts tagged as Hackery

These monome devices, described as “adaptable, minimalist interfaces”, let you hack a grid of lights. The extreme design reduction liberates the device’s perceived potential. Adding any extra features to the device would be like replacing a blank canvas with a coloring book. The device is built by two people from the future, brian crabtree and kelli cain, where capitalization has long been regarded as superfluous decoration.

That technology is Ryan Dahl’s Node. It’s the most exciting new project I’ve come across in quite a while.

At first glance, Node looks like yet another take on the idea of server-side JavaScript, but it’s a lot more interesting than that. It builds on JavaScript’s excellent support for event-based programming and uses it to create something that truly plays to the strengths of the language.

With the maturity of tools and availability of friendly sys admins, it’s easy to take for granted the many base technologies that power our applications. Adding HTTPS support to a site is very much a plug and play affair, which is why it’s refreshing to see Jeff Moser peel back a couple of layers to reveal what really happens in those first milliseconds between the browser and the server.

Barely mentioning its corporate patron, this Google-sanctioned website doubles as an awkwardly latent promotion of the Chrome browser as well as a showcase of what’s possible using the latest browser technologies. Some of the experiments are genuinely eye-opening.

Adrien Friggeri built this fun jQuery prototype that allows you to use mouse gestures to navigate a site. You would have to put in a good amount of thought to make this useful outside of a UI sideshow, but the feedback that traces your mouse movements after you click is super addictive. As someone who indulges in a host of free interactions anywhere I find them, this would be a killer feature for a site to have. I would love to be thoughtlessly doodling spirals as I read a blog post.